Our Vital Statistics (2016)

After very nearly doubling our business through 2015, we did some analysis on closed deals to see what we are good at and where we can improve.

Our promise to ourselves, let alone to our clients, is that we will will always continue to make improvements on what we do. As such we are happy that our client relationships deepened in 2015 and we were entrusted to execute on more and more searches of critical value.

Let`s keep that going!

Summary

The vitals through 2014-15 were:

2/3`s of our business was with “Small Global” companies, as in high growth startups coming into Japan.

38% of our business was in “Cloud“, as in PaaS and SaaS, 18% “Network & Security“and 12% “Big Data“, followed by everything else (Mobility, AdTech, Infra, DevOps, etc).

76% of our searches were entrusted to us as the Exclusive or Primary Agent.

31% were for Technical & Specialist talent, mostly Pre-Sales or some kind of Specialist role.

28% were for senior leadership roles such as Business Unit Head or Country Manager.

Small companies

So in summary with two-thirds of our business being with startups, we seem to be very good at supporting start-up IT vendors entering and expanding in the Japan market, whether the search be senior management such as Country Manager, SE Manager or specialist contributor. Such clients tend to have anywhere from zero to 30 people on the ground in Japan and are within their first years of business here. They have very flat organisations and are busy establishing partnerships, readying product and winning vital Japanese customers as references to expand from.

Large companies

We also placed a number of senior executives into larger clients such as HR Director, Operations Director, Professional Services Director, Marketing Director and Sales Director (VP). These companies are mature and well established, usually with 500 or 1,000 or more people on the ground in Japan. For reference, one of the placements we made in this category was the direct manager of 150 people.

Visuals

As a small and highly specialised search agency we have stayed away from the “volume” contingency business but that will be where we go in future. For now though, we are sticking to our strengths:

Searches where our expertise is vital to helping clients win over “high value” talent that drives their business

Our business was well spread across Leadership searches such as Country Manager, or Director/VP roles, Technical and/or Specialist roles and Sales and Marketing. Our RPO business also grew significantly.

80% of our business is on the sales side, reflecting our strong work with startup companies that essentially have sales operations in Japan.

A huge portion of our business to date is in the cloud space (primarily SaaS), with many other clients across categories including “big data”, security, mobility, Ad tech, and more. Core sectors covered include Enterprise Technology and Digital Media.

Murray Clarke

Murray is the Founder and President of Experis Executive. As a recruiter he has recruited exclusively for global technology companies building their businesses in Japan…